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Renunciation

Question: What should we identify as renunciation!

Answer: What we call renunciation is as Je Rinpoche described in the Three Principal Paths:

Reverse attachment to this life by familiarizing your mind with the fact That leisure and endowments are difficult to find and there’s not much time to live! Reverse attachment to future lives by repeatedly thinking About the suffering of samsara and the unfailing nature of karma. By meditating thus, if you don’t develop for even an instant A wish for the good things of samsara And aspire to liberation throughout day and night, Then you’ve generated renunciation.

Thus he spoke. Regent Maitreya taught by means of a metaphor that wherever we are born, high or low, in the six realms of samsara, it has a nature of suffering, there’s not the slightest true happiness there. Just like there is no pleasant fragrance in a sewer, swamp or cesspool, there is no happiness anywhere, high or low, in samsara. Although each of the six realms’ beings have many sufferings specific to them, to take the human state for example, the suffering may be included in three categories. Those are pervasive compounded suffering, suffering from change, and suffering of suffering. Since two of those are manifest suffering they are easy to identify. Pervasive compounded suffering is difficult to identify. That is because it stays hidden beneath a facsimile of happiness. To take a modern example of having gross pride in mundane happiness, say we buy a very impressive and expensive car. When we buy it our way of apprehending the impressive car becomes mistaken in that, in our pleasure of having it, we come to think that our car is so wonderful that there is not another one like it in the whole world! As soon as we have the car we are on a course for suffering. Through such suffering as worrying about our car being seized or stolen or the suffering of it being ruined, the other two sufferings will manifest simultaneously. Similarly, people today revel in the pleasures of gambling and going to bars but the facsimile of happiness that they experience with pride of ignorance is actually the foundation for suffering. The experience entices and leads them into ruin. Having become like a servant or slave to such apparitions of suffering we have been wandering in the three realms of samsara since beginingless time up to the present. Even as we now recognize this suffering nature for what it is, if we do not practice sublime Dharma, we are certain to experience even more of such incessant suffering. Contemplating this, exhort yourself to make a commitment and bring the reasons to mind: This time I’ve attained a precious human life with leisure and endowments! I’ve met a qualified Lama! At this time when I have the karma and good fortune to receive such profound instructions from the Lama I will practice the holy Dharma well! Recognize that pridefully enjoying imaginary happiness is the trap of problem-filled samsara; and that the good things of samsara possess not even a sesame seed’s worth of their supposedly attractive qualities. View it like a sewage plant, an island of cannibals, or a lair of poisonous snakes. Deeply reverse your desire and craving for samsaric existence, like a person with hepatitis who is made nauseous by burnt dregs of porridge. That’s pure renunciation.